Imperfection
by Pandorama
Summary: The beach and the backstory. Pairings include thunder x lightning, sand x water, past x present, life x interruptions, and hot administrator x badboy diagnostician. Oneshot.


Sea air. It has a distinct smell, and until this very moment, Cuddy hasn't realized how much she loves it.

The first two weeks had been a stumble in the dark. Awkward and tentative and terrified of failure, interspersed with interrupted moments. Rachel's cries, House's phone, Wilson's knock, Cuddy's Blackberry. Conspiring, it seemed, to throw them off each other's scent, prevent any semblance of sanity in an insane start.

Cuddy sighs and leans her head back to rest against his shoulder, the scruff of his beard symmetric with the sand under her fingers.

A kiss among shards of glass led to a slow undress and an even slower ingress; painstakingly so, rediscovering every atom of one another as though they had all the time in the world, oblivious to the coming rays of sunlight and the intrusion of absolutely everything but the other.

She had left him wistfully in the tangle of sheets, marred with dust from the night's tumble. When she saw him again, he was clothed and clean and scrawling notes on a whiteboard while mocking his foundling fellows. The hitch of a smile was barely noticeable but sufficient to stain her cheeks cherry red as she passed.

She shivers as the air moves around her; his arm wraps around her and she thinks she would be perfectly happy to never move.

The end of the day found her on the outside, looking in, his fellows feeding on caffeine and textbooks while he brooded and bounced his ball, maudlin and mulling. Leaving her nothing to do but lay a hand on his shoulder and say she'd see him when he was through.

Through turned into two days, none of it spent in repose, and then a long sleep on Sunday to recoup. Her heart had leaped when his name flashed on her phone, a stolen image of him slumbering in his Eames, mouth agape, accompanying the name. She'd aimed at a balance of domestic and desirable only to have dinner cut short by the unremitting howl of a toddler and though he'd tried to mask his discomfort, it had been no use for him to remain when sleep would only elude them both.

His fingers brush the raised hairs and goosebumps on her arms and, wordlessly, he sheds his jacket and eases her into it. It smells like him.

Then it had been she; buried under piles of paperwork and answering a torrent of calls from benefactors. She'd managed a short lunch and a coy brush against his shin as she suggested he might be her date to the fundraiser the week after next and lost her breath when he'd accepted, albeit contingent on what she'd wear. He'd suggested satin of their binding hue: blue, not baby nor royal. Cerulean, specifically.

Their schedules hadn't allowed for another foray into courtship for two more days, and then it had been Marina, with a mea culpa to cancel and so too did Cuddy. Instead, he'd arrived at her house a half hour after she did, bearing lo mein and sweet-and-sour soup and something with eggplant. The absence of meat had not gone unnoticed and she thought it might have been the most romantic thing he'd ever done, sacrificing his appetite for her tastes until she realized it was not sustenance but sex that he was starved for. Where last time had been languorous, this time was all prurient passion, both of them seemingly insatiable until the vibration of both phones at once brought them back to ground-level: a new mystery for him and a headache for her; the daughter of her least favorite donor coughing blood.

Her finger unfurls to the east, the thick soup of gunmetal grey looming not far. He squints and sighs and lets his arm drift south. It's only rain.

House's softer side that she'd glimpsed in past days had not held for the rest of society, and all emotion aside, she could hardly blame a fraught father for cold-cocking him. His tone bored at best, he'd returned judgment with his usual vacuum of empathy, disdain dripping slowly from the drawled diagnosis: Goodpasture's. Curable, he'd noted, but only if Daddy's little girl could keep off the cocaine.

Torn between tending to the bruised boyfriend and placating the parent, she had chosen to leave House to his flock, regretting it before she'd even done it and moreso when she'd caught the slightest trace of hurt flicker on his visage. By the time she'd sorted things out, his office was empty, void of even his fellows.

She jumps at the first crack of thunder; he laughs and that startles her even more. She tries to recall the last time she heard such a sound from him and finds that she can't.

On a barstool, barely past noon, she'd found him: halfway through his second three fingers of scotch (neat, with a twist). She'd settled beside him and signaled for a drink, pleased by the puzzled pause from House when she'd ordered. White vermouth (on the rocks, and a maraschino on the side). She'd sipped slowly, both of them silent, drained her drink and chewed the cherry, and then twirled the sticky stem in her fingers. Conspiratorially, she'd leaned in, and asked if he knew that she could tie it with her tongue.

He'd nearly smiled as he answered in stride. He knew.

He knew everything about her.

The flash of lightning pulls at the seam of the sky. She turns her face just enough towards his that her lips tickle his chin. She thinks to herself that she craves chronically for him to kiss her.

Prostrate and parallel on her mattress that night, she'd told him point-blank that it wasn't working. Not like this. The cold waves of disappointment coming off him had soon been replaced by a warm hand to bare chest and sultry sighs with a faint trace of a smile. They needed a respite from the tumult of normalcy, from expectation and obligation.

They were both too old for hooky by a considerable span, yet too stupidly sexed to come up with anything remotely resembling reason. In the end, only one thing made sense: she may have been his superior, but they both answered to the brilliance of the boss.

Jean-clad like Jersey youth, clinging to his hips, they made the escape into evening and open road, a foray into possibility. She had sworn never to mount his deathtrap, but like every other promise she had made regarding House, it was worth going back on.

Craning her neck back, she watches the rain trickle down his face and onto hers, warm and wet and utterly intimate. Soaked and sensuous, they fold together and she shivers with the understanding that she has waited and wanted this for twenty years. His hands, his body, the water and weather, the angry waves and the silver sky. Wet on the outside and warm on the inside and she sees them from somewhere in space as she splinters in his grasp, engrossed and in love with the imperfection of the moment.


End file.
